The Secret History of Las Vegas

by Chris Abani

  I see you found your therapy, he said.

  Salazar followed that first dinghy with a fleet of craft—slopes, canoes, sailboats, and yachts. Most of them were arranged in display cases around the garage. A few he gave away to friends and to kids at the local hospital at Christmas. Only rarely did he ever put any of his boats or ships into actual water.

  The first time had been to honor the junkie he’d shot: a kind of warrior’s send-off. For that, Salazar had driven out to Lake Henderson, where he’d placed the second boat he built on the water, drenched it in lighter fluid, and set it on fire. He watched it sail away until it burned to nothing twenty feet from the shore. Since then he’d built only five craft that had touched water, five for the five people he’d shot over his twenty-year career. It was an unusually high number, but over time Salazar had come to wear his kills with an odd kind of honor.

  This new ship, the Spanish galleon, had been ongoing for two years, the longest it had taken him to build a ship. Destined for the water—not in honor of any of his victims, but rather for the girl whose murder he’d been unable to solve—it was growing more ornate. It measured four feet from stern to bow and it had eight sails, twelve cannons, three decks, and real stained glass for the windows of the captain’s quarters. It was essentially finished, but since he hadn’t solved the case, he couldn’t let it go. Then yesterday he began what he realized was the final touch, a masthead, nearly a foot long: a siren with the face of the dead girl. It was a cool evening and Salazar was sanding down the siren, wondering what colors he would paint her.

  Vines had dropped by earlier. Long retired, he spent his days playing golf and his nights gambling in the casinos off the Strip where the locals went.

  Vines took in the muddy black shoes in the corner. Been fishing, he asked.

  Salazar followed Vines’s gaze and shook his head. I’ve been out by Lake Mead searching for shallow graves. Fucking muddy and shitty work.

  Still fucking around with that case?

  The killings started again, Salazar said, catching Vines up, telling him about the twins, Sunil, and his frustration.

  Aha, well, at least you’ve got the divers, Vines said. They find anything yet?

  No, and they left this afternoon.

  Shit, so you have no help?

  Not even a partner, Salazar said.

  No partner? That’s just what the department does as you get close to retiring.

  It’s not that, Salazar said.

  Shit, I was just trying to be nice. You know, maybe no one can put up with you since I left.

  Fuck you, Salazar said, laughing. I do have some help though.

  The shrink.

  Yeah, the shrink.

  That’s all well and good, but don’t get lost in all that profiling shit, Vines said. Good police work is about following the small details diligently. Don’t forget who taught you that.

  In your fucking dreams.

  Any good leads?

  No.

  Vines walked around the workbench in the middle of the garage. Ever notice how a ship kind of looks like a coffin, he asked. Square at one end, tapered at the other. This one’s about the size of a child’s coffin, he said.

  A fly alighted on the ship. Salazar flicked at it. Aren’t you late for senior discount at the casinos, he asked.

  Fuck yeah, Vines said, glancing at his watch. At the door he paused and, looking back, he said: Burn this one quick, rookie, and move on.

  The moon was full and yellow as Salazar walked Vines to his car. Harvest moon.

  Twenty-eight

  You look like shit, Sunil said to Salazar.

  Salazar, unshowered, unchanged, unshaven, sporting bloodshot eyes and nursing a cup of coffee, stared at himself in the reflective glass of the casino door. Yeah, he said. Well, you’re no fucking beauty queen yourself.

  When his cell phone rang thirty minutes before, Sunil had just walked into his apartment and was quite looking forward to some downtime with a beer and basketball on TV. Salazar wanted Sunil to meet him at Fremont Street in front of the Golden Nugget. Immediately. Salazar sounded so like a B-movie gangster, Sunil was tempted to laugh. But there he was, meeting a surly Salazar and wondering to himself how much neon there was in this city. Now, that was a question he was sure Water had an answer for.

  See those kids over there, Salazar asked, pointing to a group of kids lounging in the middle of the covered pedestrian walkway that sheltered this part of Fremont. They were sprawled across a white bench reflecting the crazy video projections on the roof of the walkway, eating hamburgers and sipping noisily on drinks. You remember that text you sent me about Fred, Salazar said.

  Yeah, did you find anything on her?

  No, no record, nothing in the system, not even a social security number.

  Then why am I here?

  Well, I figured if you were looking for a freak lover with a sideshow, where better to start than with the freaks themselves.

  And you need me for what?

  Freaks are your thing. Besides, I don’t have a partner so you’re it.

  Who are these kids?

  Street kids. I try to watch out for them and they in turn keep me informed on things I want to know. They’re kind of like CIs.

  Hey guys, Salazar said to the kids. This is Dr. Singh. Dr. Singh, meet the gang. This is Horny Nick, he said, pointing to a teenager with star-shaped horns implanted in his forehead.

  Coral probably, Sunil thought. With time it would fuse to look like real bone. They were disturbing but beautiful. When Nick smiled, Sunil could see that his teeth had been filed to points and he was sporting two-inch-long fingernails painted black.

  And this, Salazar said, pointing, is Annie.

  Annie took off her sunglasses and tucked them over her hair, revealing pointed ears, like an elf or a Vulcan. She ran her tongue over her lips and Sunil saw it had been split down the middle, but it was her eyes that transfixed him. Her sclera were a deep purple and her pupils a royal blue. There were two other teenagers with Annie and Horny Nick, a boy and another girl, and although their entire bodies, faces included, were covered with tattoos and piercings, they looked normal in comparison.

  These two delinquents here are Peggy and Petrol, Salazar said.

  Sunil nodded. Salazar thinks you might know someone we’re looking for, he said. He reached into his back pocket and took out a photo of Fire and Water. The kids studied the photo for a while before passing it around. Sunil watched their eyes, noticing shifts in expression, but it was only Annie who said: a real freak! She sounded envious.

  We haven’t seen them, Petrol said, passing the photo back almost reluctantly.

  Who else might have seen them? Where would they go, Salazar asked.

  You should ask Fred, Annie said. Fred knows everything.

  The others glared at her and Sunil caught the look.

  I’m not a policeman, he said. I’m a doctor. I don’t want to harm Fred. I just want to talk to her. In fact, Sunil said, pointing to Water in the photo, this one says he is in love with Fred.

  The kids laughed.

  Everyone is in love with Fred, they said, almost in unison.

  Where can we find this fucking Fred person, Salazar asked.

  The kids looked away.

  Please, Sunil said.

  She lives out in Troubadour, Horny Nick said.

  The ghost town, Sunil asked.

  Fred doesn’t like uninvited guests, Petrol said.

  Here, Sunil said, digging into his pocket and passing a twenty-dollar bill over to Peggy.

  As she took it she leaned into him. Be careful, she whispered. Someone is following you.

  Why would anyone follow me, he asked.

  How the fuck should I know, she said. But I’m never wrong.

  As they walked away, Salazar turned to Sunil.
What was all that about, he asked.

  She thinks I’m being followed, Sunil said.

  Do you think you’re being followed?

  No. Why would anyone follow me?

  Salazar looked Sunil over for a minute, then said: Listen, is the ghost town far from here?

  Yes, a couple of hours.

  When do we leave?

  Why don’t we go tomorrow morning? Come by my place about nine a.m. You’re driving, by the way.

  What’s your address?

  Like you don’t know, Detective.

  As Sunil drove home, he kept glancing in his rearview mirror. Two cars behind him, Eskia smiled.

  Twenty-nine

  In this dream, Selah is an angel oak and all her leaves are yellow, a bright yellow like the soft down on a chick and irradiated by sunlight so the very air, the sky, is all yellow.

  The tree is in a field of yellow shrubs: a yellow sky, a yellow field, and a yellow tree. The only things that are not yellow are the black limbs of the tree.

  Water stands in the soft down of the shrubs and looks up at the tree. Selah, he says, crying, Selah.

  The yellow tree shakes in a sudden wind until it is stripped of leaves, of everything. Now Water is standing in a brown field next to a small cabin leaning drunkenly.

  Selah, he calls again, Selah.

  Where is your brother, the tree asks.

  Water looks down to his side and Fire is gone. He runs his hands down his sides and he is healed, his skin unmarked.

  I don’t know, he says, his voice heavy with awe. What does this mean, Mother?

  The tree turns white. A rude tree in a field of green and white and in the distance the white shrubs. Water looks around, confused.

  Where am I, he asks no one, because there is no one to ask.

  And the sky grows dark and brooding like a storm was coming, but there is a purity to the tree, to it all.

  Selah, he calls one last time to the tree.

  There is nothing but the searing whiteness everywhere.

  Wake up, Water.

  When he opened his eyes, a nurse was standing over him in the glare of the fluorescent overhead lights.

  Time for your medication, the nurse said.

  Water took the pill and swallowed it, then lay back, his breath shallow and ragged. Beside him, wrapped in the smoothness of his caul, Fire snored.

  BUTTERFLIES

  The sign outside painted in uneven lettering on a piece of plywood read: GOGO’S CURIO AND BOOKSHOP. Run by Gogo, a shriveled old woman who could have been colored or Indian or even a sunburned Boer, it was a place where people from different races overlapped without worrying about the authorities. Perhaps it was Gogo’s racial ambiguity, or her reputation as a fierce witch with so much muthi that even the police were unwilling to come up against her; whatever the reason, Gogo’s curio shop was probably the most liminal place in all of Jozi, sitting as it did in a dead zone between the Wits University campus and the Fort. The wall facing the street was covered in a colorful mural, and a ditch and a fence hid the entrance, which was down an alley.

  Her customers included university students, interracial lovers hiding from anti-miscegenation laws, sangomas, curio hunters, rare-book collectors, and more. It seemed sometimes to Sunil that all the misfits in Jozi met up there.

  He had been coming to Gogo’s since he stumbled on the store as a sixteen-year-old and Gogo had given him a torn paperback copy of Tropic of Cancer. He came because he imagined his parents must have met in a place like this. Gogo’s always smelled of frankincense, which she kept burning on coals in a small black cauldron behind the counter.

  Keeps the customers honest, she said to Sunil once with a wink. Besides, it smells like church, holy and mysterious.

  He had to agree. Seen through the thin haze of smoke, everything looked mysterious. The mummified animals; the mummified human hand and head; the strangely formed rocks; animal pelts and skins; freshly killed owls; bones; dried herbs; the books—stacked everywhere; and strange jewelry from Tibet (malas and turquoise rings)—amber with insect fossils, and rings and necklaces with butterfly wing fragments encased in resin.

  It was the last place Sunil expected to meet Jan. He’d never seen her at the bookstore. She looked up at him when they both reached for the same book. They each knew the risk of it, in those days, but that only made it more exciting; and during a conversation on the amazing hummingbird moth, held over the book neither would let go of, she touched his hand and asked if he would like to go back to her place. Her forwardness both attracted and frightened him.

  Her small flat was made smaller by the glass cases and frames that covered every surface: walls, tabletops, couch, the dining chairs, and the floor.

  Come in, she said, walking in and dropping her handbag in the middle of the rubble. He followed somewhat timidly, fighting a strong urge to tidy up. Jan grabbed mugs from the draining board in the kitchen, poured wine from a half-empty bottle, and handed him a mug.

  Cheers, she said, clinking. Well, it’s not much, but it’s all mine.

  Quite, yes, Sunil said, thinking the untidy mess of her apartment didn’t match the somewhat severe Jan of the classroom. But then, that wasn’t uncommon among white South Africans. It was common knowledge that most led a double life. What was shown in public was a repressed, conformist, and exaggerated morality. But the home life was completely different, revealing everything from messiness to deviant sexual behavior. A double life, however, was a privilege no blacks had because while whites were safe from scrutiny behind their front doors, blacks were always under scrutiny.

  Come see this, Jan said, and sat at her kitchen table, bent over a butterfly she placed carefully under a microscope. Come see, she said. He shook his head and sipped the cheap wine. Watching her, he’d loved that she could get lost so easily in her study. He thought it a wonderful thing to sort and label whole species, to mount them behind glass as proof of certainty. She smiled up at him and he smiled back, wondering in that moment if what Lacan said was true: that loving someone else is impossible. That all we love is the space between our own desires—to be seen and to be wanted. It wasn’t unusual, he supposed, that as a psychiatrist-in-training he would think of Lacan when he thought of love, but he did find it irksome the way his mind seemed to get between him and his body, between him and the world. He imagined it was different for Jan. She seemed to have a more visceral engagement with things when she was in her own world.

  And he knew her power, her raw power, when she got up from the table and came to him covered in the tinsel from the butterfly’s wings—iridescent and multicolored. Knew from the way she moaned when they made love later that night, from the way she got out of bed and ran into the cold kitchen to get something to eat because sex made her hungry. Knew from the way she bit into a pear and closed her eyes for a second as though tasting it for the first time. For him it was second-hand always, the facsimile of the experience.

  That night passed in a blur of sex and sleep, and he woke to a proliferation of color and wings, and in that cold morning light irradiated with butterflies, he felt an ache unlike anything else before or after. He knew then as he watched her sleep that he would leave and never come back. If he stayed, his life would never be the same. The mystery of it, the danger of its change, also carried with it the terror of healing. He wasn’t ready for that. The ache he felt could never be filled, not by her, not by anybody. He knew enough to know that if he stayed, she would become the scab over a deeper wound that he would pick and pick until there was nothing. Before she woke, he left.

  That day he went to Gogo’s and bought a beautiful men’s signet ring in silver with a Blue Mormon wing fragment in a clear mount. Beautiful, it was more than he could afford. When Gogo found out it was for a girl, she slipped it onto a silver chain.

  For her neck, she said. Strange gift for a girl, but she will never
forget it. Bound to make an impression, she added.

  The next day in class, he sat next to her. She ignored him at first, but then he placed the unusual gift on top of her red Bible, blue on red, and she blushed and smiled, her hand coming to rest on it.

  For me?

  Yes.

  Thank you, she said.

  But before class was over, he left, and a week later he was on a plane to Holland on a government educational exchange program. While he was away, he found out through an old acquaintance that Jan and Eskia became an item, that they even dropped out of school to be together. He would not see Jan again until Vlakplaas.

  SUNDAY

  Thirty

  The sunlight was filtered to a muted blue by the stained glass of the kitchen window. It was the only room in the house that had only one window—high up and small, like the opening in a monk’s cell.

  Asia paused in front of the fridge, her reflection catching her by surprise. Long black hair, full lips still stained a little red from last night’s lipstick, a long lean neck, and a body taut from dancing. The pristine steel of the fridge door bothered her, and before she opened it to take out the eggs she made sure to smudge it a bit with her fingertips.

  Normally Asia would be turning in after a long night. The only other time she was up this early was when she’d slept over with a client who’d paid for the whole night. Then she would wake and sneak off, unless of course there was breakfast. But everything was different when it came to Sunil. Even the money he still left in the Bible for her was now a mere formality for her. She took it and paid it into a bank account that she never touched. She only took it because it allowed her to maintain a certain distance to protect her heart. He’d called her late and asked her over, and even though he was a client she’d spent the night with, she was up making him breakfast. She never made breakfast for herself.